Friday, April 18, 2008

Initially for exploration of the features working with mouse may feel fancy but as you continue using the tool for project development and want to concentrate more on task in hand you start finding ways to do things faster. NetBeans IDE 6.1 provides many keyboard shortcuts if used judiciously they can save a lot of developers time.

I use certain shortcut keys more often than other keys. This is a list of the keyboard shortcuts for NetBeans IDE which I use in my day to day development tasks.

1. CTRL+F12 Navigate to Member

When my class becomes big and there are many methods in the class navigating to a specific method becomes easy with this dialog box.

As soon as I start typing the name of the desired method the dialog contents are filtered for me to select from matching method names starting from what I have typed.

2. SHIFT+ESC Toggle Editor Maximize / Minimize

I like working in the fully maximized editor window. SHIFT+ESC maximize the editor window for me and I can work with full concentration. When I need to see other windows I can again press SHIFT+ESC and I get the normal layout of windows back.

3. CTRL+7 Activate Navigator Window

When I am in maximized editor mode and I need to navigate to some method, either I choose the method 1 as described above or sometimes I use CTRL+7 to activate the navigator window. The windows other than editor in NetBeans follow a specific pattern, you can type characters and a quick search window appears which selects the most appropriate item from the window according to what is typed in this quick search window.

4. CTRL+/ Toggle Comment

For quick commenting of some lines I select those lines and press CTRL+/ to comment all those selected lines. The same lines can be uncommented again by following the same process.

When I am in the Navigator window through the shortcut CTRL+7 and I want to navigate back to the editor i press CTRL+0. I do not need mouse to do this navigation and save a lot of time in navigating between windows.

7. CTRL+# Activate different windows

These shortcuts are handy for navigating between the different windows. They become very important when I work in maximized editor mode.CTRL+1 - Project WindowCTRL+2 - Files WindowCTRL+3 - Favorite WindowCTRL+4 - Output WindowCTRL+5 - Services windowCTRL+6 - Tasks Window

8. ALT+INSERT Generate Code

When I need to generate getter setters or constructors this key combination brings the Code Generation menu

9. ALT+F7 Find Usages

Many a times I want to track all the occurrences of a particular method call. Who is calling my method. This Find Usages dialog comes handy in such times.

10. CTRL+F4 Close Editor Window and CTRL+SHIFT+F4 Close All Editor Windows

I use these keys often to close my editor windows and save many mouse clicks.

In my case I seldom use this shortcut because I follow the habit of getting the code auto-completed from NetBeans. NetBeans adds the import automatically when we auto-complete the elements. Yes but this shortcut is handy to use when you copy paste some code in your file and now want to organize all the imports.

I enjoy reading a decent font (I mean medium-big) while I code, but sometimes I need to make a ZOOM out to see the structure, so changing the size in the options is a pain in the ass.........Is there any shortcut to make it easily while we are editing?

One thing I miss is fast navigation to next or previous member (method, field, etc.) with the keyboard, like ctrl-alt-up arrow and ctrl-alt-down arrow. I think it's not possible with netbeans or is it ?

CONTOL + SPACE instead of typing "this." then alt enter... then delete the "this." is slow when you forget a method name lol...ALT + ENTER is uber awesome when you are in middle of looping classes like GroupLayoutGroups

Another great article about shortcuts based on this one is CTRL+; (ctrl and semicolon) which adds a semicolon to the line. Very useful. For Php it doesn't work but you can use macros to set up the same thing.

Great other article about shortcuts based on this one (including macro details): http://www.phpmag.ru/2009/01/23/extremely-usefull-netbeans-shortcuts/

I remember using some shortcut for generating template for the likes of "for (i=0; blah blah)" and "if else.." but am unable to locate it now. poor memory, poor memory !Does anyone remember the shortcut ?

About this blog:

The blog started on 19 March 2008 and continues exploring NetBeans IDE from different perspectives. This blog was as a participant in the Netbeans IDE 6.1 Beta blogging contest held on 14 March to 18 April 2008 and was included in the top first 100 blogs.